The bigotry of low expectations

[Avoidy]

Troll topic, but to the OP's point if you do not like it vote with your wallet.

In a perfect world this would work, but recently I've learned about the sheer extent to which the average fan spends in this game and it's kinda nutty. There are so many people playing this game right now who don't care about the actual video game aspect of it and just play to /beesknees in a dance club or textfuck strangers, so whenever a new cash shop outfit or mount comes out, they buy it immediately. No questions asked. It's new, they can afford it, they open their wallet to get it. And when there's serious downtime instances like during covid where we went a year with no updates because of the pandemic shutting the office down, they just stay subbed anyway despite the literal maintenance mode scenario because for them the content is the social/community stuff. And some of these people spend hundreds of dollars every day on just fantasias. Making constant micro changes and stuff. Spending ten dollars on a minor eye color change and then realizing they hate it so they spend another 10. And another. And another. I've watched people do this. I actually have met several people firsthand who would drop hundreds of dollars on fantas when they went on sale and then burn through them all in like a day, turning themselves into meme transformations for 20 minutes before getting bored and fantaing to something else.

The point of this post isn't to shit on people who enjoy spending money on a hobby. Rather, it's to demonstrate how, like... okay, let's say I think the newest dog mount is ridiculous and should've been in the game as a reward for doing Eden on BLU, so I don't buy it to "vote with my wallet." I'm protesting a scummy practice by refusing to support it with my wallet. But it doesn't matter, because for every person like me who takes that principled stance, there are thousands of people who haven't thought that much about it and don't give a shit and will happily just buy whatever's thrown at them even if enabling scummy sales tactics makes the game scummier in the long run. They don't care, literally they don't care as in they haven't even considered it, and they far outnumber people like us who do, so the "vote with your wallet" philosophy fails to achieve results. The game's just got too many of these "ride or die" fanboys who refuse to think critically about how their purchases shape this game's future. I had this revelation for myself when I watched a new cash shop update drop while the game was in a particularly bad content lull. I remember wondering aloud why that item wasn't added into the base game as an event to tide people over through the content drought, and the community basically asked me if I was poor or something and then they all proceeded to just buy the item without a care in the world. I went to limsa and everyone had it on, and that was when I realized like, holy shit, these people are going to get the game they deserve and it won't even bother them since they don't even play it; half of them are just on to idle in a dance club and then fondle some balls.

Basically whales and moderate spenders who turn their brains off outweigh the sensible consumer's vote 1000 to 1 so nothing matters. Even if you unsub as some act of mega protest, yoshi or one of the producers, I don't remember tbh, basically confirmed in an interview that their cash shop being so successful is why they don't mind people unsubbing to play other shit. So basically all these people who hated the game and left didn't even make a blip on square's radar because this game's just got that many people buying these shitty mounts that they don't even use in game because 95% of their time is spent in a town or in a house lol. And posting here won't matter because nobody important reads these boards. Basically if you hate the direction this game's going, just give up 'cause it's over fam. Enjoy what you can while you can and dip once you can't stand it anymore.